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No Smoking Moon Kings

My relationship with the Moon Knight character has always been like that best friend in elementary school you lost contact with. At one point you two were completely inseparable; always sitting next to each other in class, getting into trouble at every turn and spending your weekend afternoon at the local gas station together dropping quarters into a Gauntlet arcade machine.

Unfortunately at some point between fourth and fifth grade you two slowly lost contact with each other. Just circumstances beyond a childs control caused you two to drift apart,meet new friends and venture down a different paths in life.

That pretty much sums up my relationship with Moon Knight.

Well I ran into my old friend last week while I was out at my local store. I was just innocently perusing through a few 50 cent boxes, the owners set out the week before, hoping for something interesting and fun to read that I wouldn’t normally pick up. It was then I came across Moon Knight series 1, issue 7. This just happened to be the very first issue of Moon Knight I owned; the first day I met my odd friend. It also happened to be the only Moon Knight issue in those discounted boxes as well. A sign?

Crazy Lady!

I immediately remembered the last page of this issue because it had been burned into my young impressionable mind. I used to just grab this issue and flip to the end it on occasion and just stare at that page.

Crazy panel huh? Moon Knights girlfriend looks like she really went off the deep end there. I used to just sit there staring at that page and wonder what Moon Knight did to overcome that situation. Unfortunately I never knew what happened in the next issue (In fact, I still don’t know). The series had went direct to market by the time it fell into my lap and I never had access to the back issue market.

I was a pretty young lad when I was first handed that issue around 1983-84. I was around eight years old I believe. The fact that I was reading a book about a man juggling multiple personalities while living a new life as the avatar of vengeance for an egyptian god named Konshu was a wee bit over my head. I was too preoccupied with the visuals of that silver (white) cloaked costume superhero and the artwork. Little did I know that I this was my introduction to whom would later become one of my personally most respected artists Bill Sienkiewicz. Looking back on it today I am still blown away by these layouts.

Moon Kings?!

This issue was the first of a two part storyline in which Marc Spector traveled to Chicago to stop a terrorist organization from extorting money by poisoning the cities public water with a strong hallucinogenic drug. Unfortunately Moon Knight doesn’t discover this in time and is in fact poisoned himself with the hallucinogen and must fight his way through a delirious mob of citizens, stop these terrorists and save his friends in the process.

This just had to be a sign I thought to myself as I bought this issue for a second time. It was fate that lead me to dig through that box and find this exact issue that caused all these flood of childhood memories and emotions. I already had Moon Knight on my mind because I knew that a new series written by Warren Ellis was about to start in March but I was on the fence about picking it up and getting reacquainted with him.

Marc Spector: Moon Knight – Issue 26

Please don’t think that I was a complete dick and ignored my good buddy until now. I did give him a call and check in on him occasionally during the “Marc Spector: Moon Knight” series and we had some good times. We clicked during the “Scarlet Redemption” storyline and had some fun when an artist by the name of Stephen Platt drew a few issues. It was just like the good old days.

Unfortunately all things come to an end and we didn’t meet up again until the third series written by Charlie Huston came around. It was during that point I really felt we did not click together and our discussions were pretty much reduced to talking about the weather. I wished him luck during his Bendis run and that was it.

I’m actually more excited now than ever to hang out with my old friend Marc Spector…err…Steven Grant…Jake Lockley…Moon Knight again. You wanna bust out some Gauntlet?